(JWR) ---- (http://www.jewishworldreview.com)
STEVE BRILL HAS UNQUESTIONABLY missed his calling: Instead of deluding
himself that he could publish a media magazine that would attain the
circulation numbers of Vanity Fair, he should’ve gone into public
relations.

Move over Howie Rubenstein, you’ve got nothing on Brill. The
prickly proprietor of
Brill’s Content hasn’t made a dent in the magazine industry with his
snore of a monthly, but man, Brill definitely knows how to promote
himself.

Against all odds, he recently procured some $10 million from
George Soros to keep the dull journal afloat for another year or so.

Talk about good money after bad. In addition, Brill owned the gossip and
media columns last week when a story about his magazine by Jennet Conant
was spiked by Vanity Fair editor Graydon Carter. Brill claims he had
nothing to do with it, but canny p.r. flacks let gullible reporters do
most of the talking.

Conant, who resigned her position at Vanity Fair, calling the killing of
her article a “sad day” for the magazine, now has her agent peddling the
piece to a number of interested periodicals, including NYPress.

(Odds
are that New York will pick up the piece, which was described to me by
someone who’s read it as “not a homer, but a solid double.” Failing
that, my bet is that the New York Observer editor Peter Kaplan will tick
off contributors who aren’t paid well at his newspaper and open Arthur
Carter’s wallet to spread Conant’s 6000 words throughout the weekly.)

As for Brill’s Content itself, the self-righteous monthly lumbers along,
putting most readers to sleep, save those who look for the
contradictions in Brill’s strict journalistic code of ethics that he
applies so stringently to the media the magazine covers, but doesn’t
concern itself with. Brill’s current editor, Eric Effron, who sullies
his boss every time he commits words to print, was worse than usual in
his “Letter From the Editor” in the June issue. “A small yelp of joy
could be heard around the offices of this magazine when New York Times
columnist Maureen Dowd in April was awarded the Pulitzer Prize for
commentary. It’s not that we’re friends of hers or even that we were
rooting for her. It’s just that we had already decided to make senior
writer Gay Jervey’s probing profile of Dowd our cover story, and Dowd’s
Pulitzer win only serves to place in sharp relief many of the questions
about Dowd’s work that Jervey addresses.”

Brill

Oh, Jesus, but that was hard to swallow. I’m sure the Brill’s staff was
rooting for Dowd; it would no doubt increase sales by a hundred copies
or so. As for the article itself, it wasn’t much: a love letter to Dowd
written in the fawning style of a college intern who’s desperately
trying to curry favor with a New York Times player. Jervey’s piece,
headlined “In Search of Maureen Dowd,” is the longest take I’ve read
about the columnist, but she doesn’t reveal much new. It’s the same
stuff: Dowd is “mysterious,” shy and private; single; fiercely loyal to
her Irish-Catholic family; a “must-read” at the White House; one of the
few pundits who refuses to supplement her newspaper salary by appearing
on talk shows; is an “equal-opportunity skewer”; plays dumb with her
sources to get them to open up; and doesn’t understand why people think
she’s “mean.”

Here’s Jervey’s idolatry: “[Friends] acknowledge that her desire for
insularity does not inoculate her from the inquisitive. But for her sake
they wish those of us who would pierce the veil of her privacy would go
away.

“Well, we can’t.”

One familiar anecdote Jervey tosses in was even worse than her quoting
some idiot describing reading Dowd’s column as a “guilty pleasure” or
the subhed in the piece that read “On to the Gray Lady.” Dominick Dunne,
the Vanity Fair writer who recently made a laughingstock of himself with
his naive coverage of Bill Clinton’s impeachment trial in that magazine,
tells Jervey that Dowd, in 1993, was “hostile” to him at a cocktail
party because she was about to review his new book A Season in
Purgatory.

Dunne said he was “very, very hurt.” Poor dear. Then this
winter, as the trial was going on, the two met up at a book party and
Dowd apologized for her behavior back then. Dunne, apparently an easy
mark, “was knocked out, stunned. I think it takes a lot of stuff to
apologize like that. So I said ‘Maureen, over, out, done!’” The author
then says that the very next day it was raining and a cab pulled over
and the passengers invited him in: and gosh darn it, it was Maureen, The
Wall Street Journal’s Al Hunt and the Times’ Jill Abramson. Yikes, thank
God I don’t live in DC, where the insularity of journalism is even worse
than Manhattan, if you can imagine that.

Dunne

I’ve bashed Dowd in the past, as well as praised her, but there’s no
doubt that her Times column is well-read. Too bad it’s so slight and
schizophrenic: She can’t decide whether she admires or reviles the
Clintons, Ken Starr or former President George Bush. She imbues her
“Liberties” pieces with too much pop culture; it’s rare that a movie or
sitcom isn’t woven in to make some kind of trivial point.

In a throwaway column last Sunday, about how everyone in DC is mad at
everyone else, Dowd writes: “The Clintons and Gores, whose ’92 campaign
was like a yuppie double date on a cross-country bus, are not so cozy
now. That New Age communitarian spirit has been replaced with
old-fashioned crankiness.

“Hillary is mad at Bill. Duh.

“...Bill is also mad at Al because there is one word Al never utters on
the campaign trail: Bill. (Bill is not mad at himself, or course. He
never is.)

“...Tipper is mad at Bill for continuing to make messes just as Al is
trying to shake off Bill’s dirt.

“Hillary is mad at Tipper for abruptly distancing herself, saying she’d
be a very different kind of First Lady.”

Okay, there are a few laughs there. Problem is, and it’s not Dowd’s
fault, is that the Times’ op-ed page is so barren, with the exception of
William Safire, that her whimsy is that much more exaggerated. If Dowd,
on the same day, was balanced by a hard-nosed columnist like Michael
Kelly (who has no talent at humor), with rotating one-off appearances
from writers like John Judis, David Tell, Mickey Kaus, Peggy Noonan or
John Seabrook, that would be a stellar editorial section, unrivaled by
any in the country. Unfortunately, publisher Arthur Sulzberger has no
vision. His refusal to fire Bob Herbert and Anthony Lewis is proof
enough of that.

Planting Fiction In the Press

I’m not Kurt Andersen’s agent, so I don’t get paid to read every single
review of his new novel Turn of the Century. However, since I thought
TOC was a remarkable achievement—aside from a quibble that Andersen’s
foil Timothy Featherstone was too wild ’n’ crazy—and is certainly the
late-90s equivalent of Tom Wolfe’s The Bonfire of the Vanities, I was
appalled at just how dishonestly Slate hosed both the book and the
author. Appearing as a weeklong discussion in “The Book Club,” Vanity
Fair’s Marjorie Williams and Microsoft’s Nathan Myhrvold, while
acknowledging some witty writing, largely dismiss the novel as elitist
and without a plot. Translated: It’s way too Manhattan- and Los
Angeles-centric, and its characters are snide white people with too much
money, who are bereft of morals.

Yet, incredibly, on Wednesday, Slate bannered the exchange as “Bonfire
of the Nerds: Nathan Myhrvold on Kurt Andersen’s Microsoft Novel.” Yes,
Slate’s parent company figures prominently in the book, but by no
stretch of the imagination is it a “Microsoft Novel.”

Also not revealed—pay attention, Steve Brill!—is that Williams is the
wife of Timothy Noah, who regularly writes for Slate and recently panned
the book himself in the May 10 issue of Fortune.

Kinsley

Then there’s the dishonesty factor: In Slate’s “Summary Judgment,”
capsule reviews of books, films, etc., on Tuesday, Eliza Truitt says
that many critics “carp about [the book’s] weaknesses.” She takes out of
context a single line from Po Bronson’s favorable review in the May 16
New York Times: “The limitation of a Zeitgeist novel is that an accurate
portrait of today can quickly feel dated and lose all its kick by the
time it’s out in paperback.” Yet immediately following that sentence
Bronson writes: “Andersen has managed to hoodwink this trade-off. He’s
got a book chock-full of references to today that stick out like neon
Post-It tags...yet he’s infused it with so much inventive imagination
that it transcends all that. This book’s vision of next year will last a
good five to seven years.”

Why was Andersen completely mistreated by Slate? I don’t know editor
Michael Kinsley, but I suspect the twisted darling of the Beltway (he
may live in Seattle, but he’s as much a slave of the ghastly Washington,
DC, culture as Al Hunt), has it in for Andersen. After all, it wasn’t
that many years ago that Kinsley was offered the editorship of New York
and ruminated back and forth before declining. Andersen took the post
instead. Kinsley apparently regretted that decision, so I wouldn’t be
surprised if he harbors some weird grudge against the cofounder of Spy.

But who can account for Kinsley’s abhorrent behavior? It was just last
summer that he made a jackass out of himself after similarly stroking
his chin over whether to replace Tina Brown as The New Yorker’s editor.
When the offer was withdrawn, he immediately e-mailed the world about
what a jerk Si Newhouse was.

Williams begins her critique on May 17 by writing that reading TOC is
“so much like being locked in the longest cocktail party of your life; a
little one-on-one conversation appeals to me as balm just now.” She pays
lip service to Andersen’s intelligence, but claims the book is
ultimately “decadent” and “creepy.” Williams writes: “Clearly,
[Andersen] has decanted into Turn of the Century every telling detail
that ever caught his eye... On almost every other page...Andersen stops
dead and clears his throat before delivering The Clever Thing I Always
Thought About Headwaiters, or The Three Types of Men You Find in
West-L.A. Restaurants. These pronouncements are almost always withering
and funny, but not the kind of thing you want to read, back-to-back, for
a 600-page stretch. It’s like eating nothing but guacamole for dinner;
before long, you think you never want to read a puckish aperçu again.”

I suppose this would be the anticipated reaction to TOC from an earnest
Washington journalist who’d have us believe she’d rather read books
about arcane environmental theories. Still, it’s fairly ironic that
Williams, who writes hatchet jobs for Vanity Fair from her smug
neoliberal nest in DC, is slagging Andersen for writing a novel with
smart and prosperous protagonists that will be read by smart and
prosperous people (unlike the majority of literary novels, which I
suppose are read by steelworkers). “Decadent”? What does that mean? No
need to spell it out: not enough poor people and straight-ahead
left-wing, wimpy politics and cultural concerns. It goes without saying
that Beltway journalists like Williams and her husband Noah aren’t
obsessed with the “status” that she ridicules Andersen’s characters for.
Kinsley has no shame, but his hitjob on Andersen was disgraceful; I
can’t believe there are still people in the media who believe that the
man has one scintilla of integrity.

Michael Wolff, in his May 31 New York “Media” column, uses Andersen’s
book—which I think he liked, sort of—as a vehicle for trashing all the
smug “old media” poobahs who don’t understand that a new information age
is well under way. And they’ve missed the boat. He describes a forum he
attended at “one of the schools where we aristocrats send our children,”
which included as panelists Jann Wenner, Steve Brill (“in dapper-don
Mafia attire”), Vogue’s Anna Wintour and Cathie Black, president of
Hearst Magazines. He took a vicious shot at Jonathan Alter (not that I
minded), the moderator: “Alter, who in his Newsweek column and
television appearances has assumed the grandeur (and become a
self-parody) of the public moralist—the last of a long line of would-be
Walter Lippmans...”

Sinatra

Wolff’s point was that these present-day titans are hopelessly
self-satisfied, and can’t begin to comprehend that the media world as
they know it, and revel in, is over. And so they’re over. He writes:
“After a while, I started to think of that tin-ear sound of television
and news magazines when they tried to get with the sixties. Joe Friday
explaining marijuana to his partner, Bill Gannon, on Dragnet circa 1968.

A suddenly groovy Frank Sinatra. The Mod Squad. Wenner, for instance,
botching the explanation, tried to explain the difference between at T1
line and a cable modem to Brill, who kept insisting he knew the
difference.”

It’s true that Wolff fashions himself as Mr. Internet, and so carries
his own prejudices, but after reading the slime on Slate about
Andersen’s Turn of the Century, the New York column was a refreshing
tonic.

Al From Baltimore Reports

May 14: I heard John McCain on the radio and read him in the Journal.
He’s the only one with a coherent position on Kosovo. He’s been
presidential. He’s the only Republican in a position to attack Clinton
after the deal is cut, or if things get even worse there. And by
extension, to go after the Democrats on China, too. Even with all the
front-page coverage, this is the most underreported scandal I can
remember. The involvement of the head of Chinese military intelligence
in Democratic fundraising in this context is the story of the decade.
All this Chinese outrage on the bombing of the embassy is just fog to
divert attention from their spy efforts.

McCain is going to own Republican defense and foreign policy. I’m sure
he’s still nowhere in the polls, but what if he wins an early primary?
Is it really sewn up at this point, barring a big mistake? Peggy
Noonan’s take on George W. yesterday reflected my own. Jeb’s success in
Florida is great for George W., because it gives him cover on the right.

Still, Democratic vulnerability is going to be defense and Bush isn’t
laying the groundwork for his assault. Bush might not need it, but who
knows where the knuckleheads who vote in this country will be in a year?

McCain

I’m registering some mild dissent on the Kurt Andersen interview. There
was way too much banter and sparring in the first half. It didn’t get
good until the middle. And frankly, he did come off as a bit of a snoot.
It was sort of a love-fest, but no reason is ever given why anyone would
want to buy his book. Compare the Dorothy Rabinowitz interview with
Kurt’s. Good for you, bad for Kurt, I guess. I think he knows he didn’t
get what he was hoping for, besides owning your front cover. Rereading
your 1988 Spy attack, it was just as well-written as the MUGGERs of
today. It was brilliant, including your half-parodying of their style. I
don’t think even I appreciated it as much then.

I’m embarrassed to admit I’m having trouble finding a recent picture of
Sam. Dina says she will find me one and Sam is totally excited about
having his picture in the paper. I’m going to do my best to write more
but I’ve got a ton of cleaning/emptying out the house this weekend. I’m
probably not going to be allowed to go to work.

I can’t get away from how inept/stupid the Republicans have been lately.
For their vote against gun screens at gun shows, they should be shot for
both political and substantive reasons. They can own the reasonable
middle ground on that issue. The National Review piece you forwarded to
me hit it right on the head. They’re lost.

May 17: Sorry I didn’t get a chance to write, but I was lifting way too
many boxes for someone my age. Didn’t go in to work Saturday. Missed my
Sunday morning run. Cleaned and hauled about eight hours each day, and
it’s not like I didn’t have help. We filled a 15-yard dumpster with
stuff, to the brim. All of our old playpens, swing-o-matics, high
chairs, humidifiers and toys that didn’t make the cut for Goodwill. Plus
pink-eye medicine, boo-boo bunnies and 20 bottles of mostly used cough
syrup. I love not having young children. I did find a note from Annie to
the tooth fairy when she was about seven. It was a plea for a bigger
payoff. At the bottom of the note it said “over.” On the back it said
“HI DAD!” Unquestionably the highlight of my cleanup weekend.
I personally hauled about 40 30-gallon bags of stuff to Goodwill, plus
25 bags of junk to the curb for the garbagemen to pick up, stuff we
missed when the dumpster was at our house. I even vacuumed the attic,
which was especially fun, given the mess that was there from the last
squirrel invasion.

Besides the physical labor, the part I found most aggravating was that
the cleaning people who we’ve been paying to clean our house don’t know
how to clean! I’m no Martha Stewart, or even Heloise, but when I see
grease, I apply soap and water, scrub, and it comes off. Shelves and
baseboards have not been dusted for years.

So, I haven’t watched any news and have barely read the papers. I did
notice that the Bosox had a piece of first place and the Orioles are
playing .333 ball.

Is Clinton still president? I heard on the radio the Kosovo deal may be
cut this week, and I saw the headline that perhaps 100,000 have been
massacred there. If that’s the case, this becomes Rwanda II, and shows
how full of it these world liberals are with their International Human
Rights trials. They’re willing to self-righteously prosecute people
after they’ve committed unspeakable crimes, but they’re not willing to
take real risks to save the victims beforehand. We knew the massacres
were going on in Rwanda, and I’m assuming we know what’s going on in
Kosovo, or we wouldn’t be there bombing away. I think I’ll clean my
office.

May 18: I’m going to buy Turn of the Century, but I’m highly skeptical.
Good MUGGER. Loved the Conason exchange.

May 19: In case you need help responding to Roy Neal Grissom [“The
Mail,” on page 44 in the tab], here it is. He makes some interesting
points about the harsher treatment anti-abortionists like Falwell
receive relative to people like the pope, who has the world’s best p.r.
and is as anti-abortion, actively, as anyone. Falwell is ridiculed for
pointing out the very obvious with the gay Teletubby. The proper
response should have been “so what?” Not, “he’s a homophobe looking for
queers everywhere.”

Mrs. M: Great to hear from you. First, regarding my alleged lack of
executive function, I had eight guys cleaning and hauling on Saturday. I
have had two different cleaning services, employing as many as three
people each in my house, every other day (it seems like). I’m not fixing
anything. But trying to get a contractor out to your house is a chore in
itself. As for this past weekend, the real estate agent is making us
empty out 2/3 of all our stuff. We had to do the sorting and packaging.

What am I supposed to do, tell my assistant, yes, let’s recycle
everything from Kurt Andersen’s oeuvre, but for Pete's sake, put the
Milton Friedman back on the shelf? After the hauling people left, we
still had more and more stuff that had to be put away or trashed. I
preferred to get it out of my house rather than trip over it for two
days. Plus, you can’t see what else needs to be done when there’s so
much clutter. And, I did make three runs to Goodwill myself, which in
truth, could have been handled smarter.

But enough about my aggravation. Gas is absolutely the way to go, though
you may want to make sure your building doesn’t have restrictions
against propane tanks. I have a nice $500 Weber grill, which is great.

However, I bought Donna [Al’s business partner] as a combination
wedding/housewarming gift an all-stainless infrared gas grill that is
really jizzed. It is absolutely the way to go. It is the same kind of
cooking surface that the best steakhouses use. It cooks at 900 degrees.
It’s very fast. It burns so hot, it vaporizes all the grease and dirt,
so there’s virtually no cleaning to the grill. It sears meat big time.

It’s just as safe as a regular gas grill. And it is fast. It costs about
$1700. The bad news/good news is Donna thinks her building has a ban on
propane; she might have to give me the grill to “hold.” I can’t remember
the brand name. I’ll call Donna and get it and send it later. I don’t
know anything about the brand, anyway, it was recommended by the
salesguy. The only limitation with the grill is it’s not great for slow
cooking. On a gas grill Weber you can slow-cook (10 hours) a rubbed
brisket or pork shoulder and have great barbecue. But how often are you
going to do that?

The kids are great. Annie leaves for Israel Monday for two weeks with
her class. No playing cards allowed. I read MUGGER, so I think I’m up to
speed on the boys.

Write for more consults when needed.

May 21: The NYPress website looks nice. Didn’t notice any of the things
Rodrigue did. When’s the “construction” going to be over? I assume it’ll
be up in a couple days. Will there be more graphics throughout? It’s a
shame to not use your lead graphics. I know about the space/loading
issues, but otherwise, your pages will look like all the other Web mags.

I love the outrage that comes from the media when they are wronged. The
media are so fallible, it’s only when you’re written about, directly
(remember how The Washington Post butchered the story about Jeff Stein
in ’82?), that you realize how inaccurate and biased the media almost
always is. GTG.

May 24: I read the Starr/Steele piece in Slate. It’s interesting, but
ultimately just a reminder that Clinton skillfully obstructed justice.
(If I were Ben Stein, I’d say it made me sad). But it really is ancient
history at this point. Clinton more and more seems like a peripheral
figure again, like he was from the ’94 elections until his successful
budget showdown with Congress.

I was going to write you about how crazy the media reaction was to the
Jenny Jones trial was, but that too seems like ancient history. It was
post-Columbine, wasn’t it?

The media commentators were obsessed once again with the potentially
chilling effect of the decision. This decision illustrates not the
vulnerability of free speech but the regular flow of crazy awards made
by juries on a routine basis. Did Jenny’s show set this guy up for
humiliation? Absolutely. Did that contribute to the murder? Definitely.
Should the fellow humiliated have known that going on a show like Jenny
Jones carries that kind of risk? Of course. Should the show have
liability for the murder? Absolutely not.
The episode has much more in common with what governments are trying to
do with guns and cigarettes. For the record, I hate cigarettes and I
hate guns (though I’m glad the police carry them). But the state and
federal governments are suing tobacco makers for products that carry a
clear warning label, and from which these same governments profit
handsomely in the form of billions in annual tax revenues. If they were
really so bad, why not legislate them out of business? Because it’s a
lot easier to do it in court than in the legislature, and the bottom
line is, it’s a way to exact another huge tax increase on the backs of
the lower-middle-class and poor while you’re telling them it’s for their
own good.

As for guns, I think the Republican performance in the Senate was a
disgrace. Aside from giving Gore a nice political coup, Republican
antipathy to sensible gun regulation is bad policy and bad politics. I’m
as anti-big government as the next guy, but I like the fact, for
example, that an inspector is keeping an eye on the processing plant
where the chicken I eat is slaughtered. I’m also happy that 12-year-olds
can’t buy guns, that people have to go through a criminal background
check to buy one, etc. I’m glad people can’t go to Wal-Mart and buy
mortars. To fight all gun regulation is as stupid.

Now that cities (including Baltimore) and states are suing, or planning
to sue gun manufacturers in Tobacco II, the sequel, the governments
themselves are promoting the abuse of our tort system while
simultaneously trying to further their policy ends (and get more taxes
at the same time). It’s a disgrace.

Whatever happened to individual responsibility, both for kids and the
parents? When we as a society say you smoked for 40 years and you’re
dying of cancer, but it’s not your fault, what message are we sending?

Gun ownership in this country has been huge since its founding. Do the
guns now operate on their own? Little by little, our society erodes the
principle of individual responsibility.

The question is, are we as a country no longer willing to rely on the
judgment of our fellow citizens as individuals to organize our
day-to-day life? Every time you take a curve in your car at 50 mph,
you’re counting on the other guy in the opposite direction taking that
curve as well (which is why, I think, liberals love mass transit). The
problem is, we live in an era when nothing bad is supposed to happen,
just as long as no one’s freedoms are in the smallest way impinged
(thank you ACLU and the gun lobby). We’re supposed to live in a no-risk
world where we still get everything we want.

So as for Kosovo, the outcome will be a face-saving settlement for us,
and then we’ll sue the bumb.

My Boys Ain’t Afraid of Irving

Yes, I understand a return to Irving the Wolf was promised many, many
weeks ago. But first, three other familiar topics: Korean delis, cab
rides and the Downtown Little League.

Last Tuesday night, on the way home, I stopped at my local bodega,
picked up a roll of Kodak film and a pack of smokes. The inflated total
came to $10.21 and I gave the cashier a $20. She was distracted by a
disgruntled customer questioning the ripeness of the bananas, and then
said, “You still owe me 21 cents.” I told her, politely, that I’d just
forked over a Jackson. “No you didn’t,” she replied with a rudeness that
wasn’t quite appropriate, “it was a 10.” We went back and forth for five
minutes—I knew I was correct since I’d had only a $20 bill in my
pocket—and then the manager intervened and said he’d play back the
transaction on videotape. Five minutes later I’m vindicated and the
woman offered a hurried apology—“Oh, sorry”—after she’d basically
accused me of being a thief. I was angry, especially since most of the
people at this deli are courteous, but did marvel at the ingenuity of
using the surveillance to settle the arbitration.

Last Wednesday, I’d promised Junior that I’d pick him up at school and
we’d head down to Brooks Brothers to purchase the seersucker and khaki
suits he’d been bugging me about. The boy’s a dapper little tyke and
knew exactly what he wanted, plus all the accessories. That part of the
afternoon went fine: Sure, he squirmed a bit when the tailor fitted the
pants, but it’s pretty tough for a six-year-old to stay still for five
minutes. Transaction completed, we walk out onto Madison Ave., at 44th
St., at 4 o’clock, the worst possible time to find a lit cab, given the
shift changes, the midtown location and rush hour. To make matters
worse, it was pouring and neither of us had an umbrella.

In these situations it’s dog-eat-dog, with New Yorkers abandoning all
manners and snatching cabs any way they can, even if it means racing
ahead of people who’ve clearly staked out a corner. No complaints,
really; in dire straits, that’s acceptable. Finally, we moved over to
5th Ave. and spotted an empty taxi; we ran to it, and a businessman
tried to muscle in front of us. Junior looked him squarely in the face
and said, “Beat it, buddy, we were here first.” We got inside and he
sported a grin the size of Rhode Island and told me, “Man, Dad, we
nabbed this one by the skin of our teeth!” Three buttons popped off my
Harvie & Hudson shirt (that one’s for you, Mr. Thomas!) when I heard
that smart aleck remark.

On Saturday morning, while MUGGER III and Mrs. M painted at home, Junior
and I went off to the ballfield where his team was playing the Mt. Sinai
Bears. Our team, the NYPress Giants, was missing three or four players,
but played exceptionally well and Junior slammed his best hit of the
season, a solid grounder that zoomed past the third baseman and
shortstop. The game was a bit more competitive than usual for t-ball,
because of an incident in about the third inning. Scott Franchi was
leading off for the Giants and powered a shot that was heading to the
outfield, when a Bears coach just picked it up like he was one of the
players. Talk about cheating! Robbing a kid of a sure triple is some
kind of sin for which punishment is deserved: perhaps spending two weeks
in the audience of a Rosie O’Donnell show. From that point on, our
coaches let the Giant boys and girls take extra bases and run up the
score.

Not everybody on the Bears was a bad egg, however; when our pitcher,
Ella Smithie, stopped a ball with her mouth and was a little dazed,
their manager came over to see how the champ was. That’s the way t-ball
is supposed to be played; not stopping line-drive hits by kids under 10.
But back to Irving. I wrote several months ago about the anthropomorphic
wolf who was the subject of bedtime stories when I took care of my
nephew and niece on a European tour back in ’75. Abbie and Cal were
transfixed, laughing hysterically as I told them about this crazy beast
who always helped me out of jams. The tales grew more fantastic as the
strong lagers went down my gullet, and I had as much fun as they did.

In Bermuda last summer, I revived Irving for MUGGER III and he, too, was
spellbound. Junior was onto me, but didn’t spill the beans to his little
brother that Dad was a big old fake. In fact, we’d huddle in the morning
and he’d offer suggestions for various plotlines. I told him that there
had to be a germ of truth in the story: It had to involve some place
that I’d visited when I was in my 20s or after I’d met his mother. And
then, I counseled Junior, let the imagination go wild. Trouble is, about
a week ago I ran out of fresh material, since after the Bermuda
vacation, MUGGER III wouldn’t go to sleep without an Irving cameo.

I was on a roll for nights on end before the cupboard was bare. There
was the time that Irving was banned from the Bristol Hotel in Paris for
staining the dining room’s carpet because of his incontinence after a
huge meal (a gigantic hit with my poop-conscious four-year-old); Irving
tracking me down after I’d got lost in the hills of Cannes; the time
when Abbie and I were at a port in Italy and ran into trouble with
knife-wielding teenagers and Irving decked every single one of them; and
the odd appearance of our favorite wolf taking over for the matador at a
bullfight in Madrid, where my brother Doug and I had first-row seats and
Irving presented us with an ear apiece from the beast he gored.
What else? Irving, of course, was present at the birth of both Junior
and MUGGER III, telling the doctors to knock off the chatter and give
Mrs. M more painkillers; he cradled MUGGER III at our rental in
Bridgehampton one afternoon and got him to stop bawling; Irving eating
steaks and sausages with Mrs. M and me in Buenos Aires; saving us from a
faulty tram in Santiago by walking nearly a mile on the highwire and
repairing the facility’s motor; lunching with the extended Smith family
in Capri, after playing engineer on the funicular up the hill from the
water; and the time he met us all in the Black Forest and gorged on the
“farmhouse snack,” which consisted of head cheese and other gristly and
jellied pig parts that even I couldn’t stomach. There was an incident in
Switzerland where Irving and a clockmaker got into a ruckus; lots of
wine-guzzling on the Rhine and the communist cabby in Manila who tried
to rob me until you-know-who showed up. And of course there was the time
when Irving was speeding in a van in North Baltimore, got stopped by a
cop and promptly chomped off his foot. That particular story was MUGGER
III’s favorite.

I suppose by now my son has caught on, for he’s invented his “own”
Irving, and in the morning tells me his own fables. They also include
his imaginary friends Snacker, Giant and Dolphin. They almost always are
a version of the previous night’s Irving the Wolf session, but it’s a
joy to hear him twist the tale just a bit to conform to his own peculiar
worldview. We’ve agreed on a moratorium on Irving stories for the time
being; MUGGER III told me, magnanimously, that reruns would resume when
we return to Bermuda this August. I’m just hoping he doesn’t question me
when the yarns deviate from the original plot. This sharp cookie is
often quicker than dear old
Dad.

JWR contributor "Mugger" -- aka Russ Smith -- is the editor-in-chief and publisher of New York Press. Send your comments to him by clicking here.

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